Schooldays
Overview:
This was the Heart of Newhaven’s first National Lottery Heritage Fund supported project. It brought together staff, resident organisations and creative practitioners based in the building to design and deliver a programme of participatory heritage and creative activity rooted in lived experience. Activities explored educational and cultural heritage through memory sharing, oral history, craft, visual art, music, storytelling and performance, using shared school day experiences as a common starting point.
The project was delivered in partnership with eight organisations and creatives based within the Heart of Newhaven including; Bookbinder Cass Barron, Printmaker Lorna Brown, Daddy Day Care (DDC), History of Education Centre (HEC), Leith Men’s Shed, MWAMBA, Spiders for Ukraine (Spiders) and Tortoise in a Nutshell Theatre Company (TIAN), alongside close collaboration with Pilmeny Development Project (PDP). Across the project, fifteen heritage practitioners and creatives were engaged, including educators and reminiscence specialists, writers, storytellers, visual artists, theatre makers, movement practitioners, a musician, filmmakers and photographers.
HoNC sits on the boundaries of both the NE and NW Locality Improvement Plans. which are the strategic frameworks designed by the City of Edinburgh Council to tackle poverty, inequality, and local community challenges. The issues were also identified in the extensive community consultation undertaken by HoNC when the organisation was set up in 2022 and have been consistently highlighted in our regular consultations.
The project explored shared and diverse experiences of school life to bring people together, reduce isolation and improve wellbeing through heritage-focused activity.
Purpose/Objectives:
The project aimed to:
- Deliver a programme of intergenerational and cross-cultural workshops focused on the theme of schooldays using the Victorian schoolroom and reminiscence-based activities as a shared heritage starting point.
- Engage older people, school pupils, and targeted groups including those experiencing anxiety, low confidence, social isolation, additional support needs, and people who have experienced displacement.
- Collect, preserve, and creatively interpret memories, stories, objects, and experiences of school life from different generations and cultures.
- Work with a professional artist to co-create a portable museum that reflects participants shared and diverse school experiences.
- Take the portable museum out into the community, sharing the heritage created through the project with schools, care homes and community groups.
It brought people together to think about what school was like in the past, what it’s like now, and what it might be like in the future. Objects from that project have been gathered together to make a permanent exhibition.
The participants:
Overall, 4073 people engaged with the project as participants, facilitators, volunteers, collaborators, partners and visitors. This included children, older adults, families, and community members from a wide range of cultural backgrounds. Work took place with pupils from four local primary schools (Victoria, Trinity, Holy Cross and Wardie), mainly P6–P7, and with adult participating through six community groups based within the Heart of Newhaven, alongside one external community group supporting Polish and Ukrainian participants.
Benefits across the programme:
Children, young people, adults and older residents built trust and confidence through shared activity. The sessions were designed to be welcoming, calm and accessible, with close attention paid to wellbeing, access needs and cultural differences. The combination of creative making, storytelling, sensory engagement, and gentle conversation helped people connect across ages in ways that felt joyful and meaningful.
The following was observed:
- Connection & Belonging: Participants described increased connection, friendships, and feelings of belonging across all groups.
- Changing perceptions and age-based stereotypes.
- Intergenerational Understanding: Repeated comments highlighted learning from other age groups and challenging misconceptions.
- Confidence & Self-Worth: Many noted increased confidence in speaking, presenting, or joining new activities.
- Creativity & Expression: Creative tasks are widely valued and linked to engagement and enjoyment.
- Emotional Wellbeing: Joy, laughter, happiness, and excitement were strong emotional themes.
- Mutual Support: Participants emphasised reciprocity, support, and shared experiences across generations and groups.
Comments from participants:
“I am beginning to see genuine friendships forming between the young and older participants of certain groups within the School Days Project.”
“Young people requested to be paired with their preferred older person in consecutive sessions.”
“Both the young and older participants remember and refer to each other on a first name basis.”
“The intergenerational project is to be applauded… some delightful friendships have developed.” (Dementia Meeting Centre member)
These repeated observations describe trust-building, continuity, and reciprocal engagement, all core indicators of social and emotional wellbeing.
Activities/Events:
A total of 63 workshops and facilitated sessions were delivered across the Schooldays programme. Participants took part in workshops, drop-ins, school sessions, community events, and celebrations. Heritage-focused activities help people connect with the stories, memories and sensory traces held within a place. In this project, the former Victorian school building we are based in and the reconstructed Victorian classroom within it, provided a meaningful starting point for exploring what school life used to be like and how it has changed over time. Participants explored themes of education, local life, memory, tradition, and change. These included objects, photographs, books and materials from the Victorian era through to the 1960s. This ensured that people of all ages and mobility levels could still handle, explore and discuss the heritage connected to the building. This small shift reminded us that heritage is something you can carry with you. The objects themselves sparked conversation and memory. People compared experiences, shared stories, and discovered unexpected links between their own lives and the buildingʼs past. In this way, the heritage felt alive, hands-on and inclusive, opening a shared sense of local story across generations. This latter informed how we developed our small portable exhibition box for further outreach work in our community.
Evaluation:
Evaluation drew on qualitative methods including observation, feedback discussions and partner interviews. We gathered feedback through session reports, reflections from volunteers, partners and group leaders, photographs and video, creative feedback methods, and participant stories. Letting people know at the beginning that evaluation was part of the project helped build trust and supported openness throughout. The approach was designed to be inclusive and non-intrusive for participants of all ages. Reflective practices were used to support balanced analysis and reduce potential bias.
The link to the full evaluation report can be found below.
Funding:
The Heritage Lottery Fund
Sustainability:
We are exploring a second stage of the project that would aim:
- To ensure the legacy materials developed in Part 1 of the project are used to maximum benefit by delivering a programme of outreach workshop sessions with community groups we were unable to schedule into the original project timescale. This would mainly be older 'young' people from Trinity Academy.
- The heritage focus would be 'teenage education, co-creating legacy materials with older people including those in local Care Homes as well as older people who attend activities at the Heart.
- To embed the longer-term legacy of the materials and ‘Heritage box’ by training volunteers of all ages to be able to share them with people who are touring the building.
Additional resources:
Schooldays website which has access to the video and the Schooldays Activity Resource Booklet.
Visual story of the Schooldays project
Priorities:
We 'bring people together'. We offer a warm welcome to our entire community, from new parents and people living with dementia, to younger and older people and visitors. We offer support to everyone in our local community and reduce social isolation. Our aim is to provide opportunities for people of all ages to come together through mutually beneficial and purposeful activities.
Scottish National Performance Framework Outcomes:
The project focus of ‘going to school’ and ’learning’ made a particular contribution to:
- Healthier: Our evaluation highlights the impact on improvement to mental well-being,
- Smarter: Opportunities for lifelong learning, developing practical and technical skills for all ages
- Safer and Stronger: The ‘sense of place’ by focussing on local assets such as the Heart supported participants of all ages to feel secure and supported in their neighbourhoods.